The Colour of December
by Harlequin Sequins
Summary: COMPLETE. But it was Gene. Gentle, healing, beautiful. Like his hands. Roe/OC.
1. Prologue: Brown

Author's Note: I've almost finished this story, only one chapter left to write and two left to edit, so I figured I'd just go ahead and post this, a taste of what's to come, and start the editing process. This is not meant, in any way, as a reflection on the real Eugene Roe. This is a piece of fiction. It is therefore based on the fictional portrayal of the medic.

Disclaimer - I don't own Band of Brothers.

* * *

Prologue;;

* * *

It wasn't the first time I'd seen death.

_My hands were the color of life. _

"_Thomas, you've gotta hear me! C'mon, don't black out on me now!"_

_Or was it the color of death?_

It wasn't the first time I wore the mark of loss.

_His heart wasn't moving. It wouldn't beat. Bathed in his blood that had stopped flowing through the pathway of his veins and escaped a dying body._

_His eyes flickered. _

"_Thomas! _

_Was it a trick of the light?_

I had felt the descent of the removing angel before.

_The engine still sputtered behind me. Drowning in the rain that battered me, that pushed me further into the ground._

"_Thomas, you'll be all right. You'll be fine."_

_My hands wouldn't still. Like machines, they worked tirelessly, furiously, through the motions. I watched the still face._

"_God damn it!" _

_Somewhere, I heard myself screaming. _

"_Don't do this to me."_

He slithered over my hunched shoulders, my blood-soaked hands, and I felt the cold sweep of his fingers.

"_Thomas, please. You...you can't go. You can't leave."_

As he bent to lift my brother's soul.

"_Thomas…please. Please…don't-"_

And left without a word to spare.

"_Don't go."_

But I still couldn't bear the feeling of him, as he bowed his black head over me.

_My hands broke at last._

His shadow staining my every wish, my every endeavor.

_I lifted my eyes to the heavens._

As he came to steal away, put to rest.

_But still the rain droned on._

The lives I had sworn to save.

* * *

copyright of Harlequin Sequins, 2010.


	2. Chapter I: Gray

Author's Notes: Well, here's the official first chapter of TCOD. HUGE thanks to Sweet A.K who has been helping me with this story. I'm sure you know about her own awesome story _The Butterfly Effect. _If you don't, you should take a look! It's really, really great. :D

Disclaimer - I don't own Band of Brothers or its characters. Just my OC.

* * *

CHAPTER ONE;;_ Gray_

* * *

I couldn't remember the last time I spoke.

Not just words of reassurance which flooded into empty eyes, filling up gaps of humanity where soul should have been. Not just the _yes sir_, _maybe sir, got any bandages sir? _ My voice was ashes, spread thin across the snow-choked banks, the skeletons of the barren trees which lifted their dead arms out of frozen graves and prayed to be swallowed up by a God they couldn't see, couldn't feel, couldn't hear outside the corridors of their imagination.

I couldn't recall the last thing I said that meant something more than admitting failure, than my vacant words of console that would never measure up to anything more than paltry endeavors, than praying for a cigarette with clasped shaking hands.

The Germans had burned it up. They burned everything I knew until it was charred and twisted and shaped beyond recognition. With their shells of fire and their bombs that created human puzzle pieces of limbs and gore and insides and I had to sift through them. I shifted through the blood-stained riddles, the shattered-bone conundrums and tried to figure out the patterns, sew them back together, back into makeshift dolls with pale faces and hollow laughter. With guns slung over their shoulders like metallic devils on their backs, forcing their hands, tearing down their purpose until there was only one – to kill.

_Destroy them before they destroy you._

I couldn't place the last beautiful sound I'd heard.

Screams for mercy that colored the blank pages of the lifeless ground, they were the only sounds that filled the gore-riddled banks of my memory now.

_MEDIC!_

The song I dreaded most.

_MEDIC!_

The one that haunted the backwoods of my dreams.

To the day I died, when I closed my eyes for the last time, I would hear those words. Their screams. Their pleas for mercy. _Don't let me die. Please, please help me! I want to go home. I want to go home. Please, help me get home!_

_MEDIC! _

_MEDIC!_

_WHERE'S THE GODAMNED MEDIC!_

_WE NEED A FUCKING MEDIC HERE!_

The death that poured down like black rain was as tangible as skin brushing skin. It trickled into the ones I couldn't save. The ones that couldn't make it, no matter how far I reached my hands into their overflowing insides, their punctured organs, their severed lives. No matter how hard I tried to stop the blood with corks of cloth and the pain with rivers of morphine. No matter how much my throat ached as I tried to talk them back to life and my lungs screamed for oxygen as the words ambled onwards with nothing but desperation to aid their way…just like they screamed. Just like they did.

It hurt. It stung. It burned like fire and brimstone. The pain pierced through skin and veins and bone to find me, to reach into the very depths of the soul. It bloomed there like a deadly flower, painted like blood shedding its blue shade for scarlet like scales. Like snakes in the underbrush. Poison flowing through the fibers of my most intimate being, the mirror image only God could reach with healing hands.

He told me it'd hurt. He told me but I didn't listen.

And all because I made the mistake of caring for them.

A mistake I would make again.

And again.

And again.

* * *

I'd do anything for a cigarette. Just a drag. A whiff. The smell of it curling off the end of one across the way. I'd strip down to nothing but my skin and my helmet and run the snow-painted hills of this forest ten times over. For just one soothing sigh filled with smoldering calm and soothing ashes and whorls of smoke that stuck like black tar to my lungs.

I didn't care about black lungs, hands that shook from cold, from something like addiction disguised in misinterpretation. Obsession, maybe. More likely addiction.

Damn it all, really. I just wanted a fucking smoke.

"Avery."

My eyes snapped upwards from their focus on the blank wasteland lying at my feet, the glittering ground that had been nothing more than backdrop to my thoughts before, but now cast a ghostly halo around a figure that stood before me.

It was a he. That was the extent of my knowledge.

_He_ hunched over me, his arm outstretched and obscured in sickly gray shadow. At the end was a hand. It was covered in clues of old scars and sweat and dirt and callused skin, and in its grasp was a rusty can full of steaming beans.

My stomach rumbled at the sight, at the first hint of an enticing smell; taking it slowly, I squinted up into the face and ignored the sizzling of my cooking fingers. They were too cold to notice; so was I.

A familiar v-shaped scar branched out like stark, pearl-pink tree limbs into warm, inviting features. A pair of soft eyes met my line of sight. The color of raw earth…the color of home. As soon as recognition struck me, a panic brought me to the balls of my frozen feet, upsetting the contents of my medic pack and my private musings in the wake of it.

"Sergeant Lipton."

He cracked a smile, but it was a half-hearted attempt. "It's all right, kid. You don't gotta call me that every time I come around." Gently, Lipton molded my hands to the shape of the tin. "Here, eat this. It'll warm you up a bit."

I watched him as he put a hand on my shoulder, an unspoken word of reassurance, and as he waded back the way he came, through the ankle-deep snow. To make his rounds, check each and every man that caught his attention. Or his foxhole. A haven composed of thawed out dirt and melting snow.

If there was any such thing as sanctuary in this numbed place. This barren snowglobe. This reality that stared those men in the face as it tore them down. Built them up in the image of the person they used to be, but not anymore.

No, they were just bloodstains now, victims of the Red, bullet-holes that gnawed at the patchwork pattern of war.

A cog in the machine of battle.

Sometimes, it seemed picture-perfect. It seemed like just a game for boys with big hands and little toys. Simple. What could be simpler than firing a gun? Aiming for a heart that was as cold as the forests its body trailed through?

I didn't know.

What was Germany?

An entity?

An enemy?

A shade of color on a map?

All I knew was the blood and the rot and the misery it caused.

Another pair of stark, crunching footsteps broke through the murmur of conversation which flitted throughout the scattered groups of soldiers. Out of instinct, I straightened up again from slowly collecting my fallen belongings as I sorted through painful thoughts. I searched for the origin of the sound, but it seemed to be coming out of nowhere. Spun out of nothing.

Monroe, a fellow medic, collapsed to his knees beside me and quickly began gathering the items.

"Jesus Christ!"

He laughed aloud, his Adam's apple bobbing up and down with the rhythmic sound. "Did I scare you kid?"

"Only a little," I retorted gently, teasingly. "Don't worry about it. Give my skivvies a quick dip in the snow and they'll be good as new again."

A caustic snort. "I think _all_ of our skivvies could use a dip in the snow."

"I'd have gotten them on my own time you know," I said as I dragged the knapsack toward my soaked-through knees and hurriedly stuffed the last trinket away. "I can take care of myself."

"No trouble, just happened to be walking by," He chuckled, giving me a playful slap to the cheek.

I grinned quietly in reply. Acceptance.

We both stood. I lifted the strap of my pack over my head. He towered over me, shoving his hands in his pockets.

After a moment of awkward silence, he gestured absently toward the coffee line. "I was just heading over to get me a cup of joe. Why don't you come on over with me? Say howdy to the boys?"

The thought of coffee piqued a level of interest. Reached the level of temptation, even. But a tentative glance at the growing mass of rowdy, half-frozen soldiers forming before the heavily steaming pot and I was deterred. My insides curled defensively into a tight fist-like ball. I was a coward. I was a medic and I was a coward. I couldn't face those men…not yet.

I hadn't saved them.

Who was I to them but an impostor?

A replacement?

I hadn't restored life where it was nearly lost.

No, not yet.

I feigned nonchalance, lifting a sluggish shoulder in response. "Nah, Monroe. I've got that shit coming out of my pores I'm so full of it. I'll be pissing coffee tomorrow."

A smile was perched upon the corners of his lips as he reached for me. Every muscle protested. Even my skin betrayed me and began to recoil at his touch. "C'mon kid, don't be shy!" He clapped me on the back. "Let's get something warm in you before you freeze to death, huh? I'll be right there. No one's gonna knock you over."

At first, the steps toward the line up were hesitant, fearful even. As a woman, free of my disguise, I had never really been painfully shy, but I had little interest in any place that promised too much small talk. When it came to discussion, I was at a loss. I fumbled for purchase on conversations that would never come to pass. Words tumbled through my head, clumsy, trying to figure out their feet, but by the time I conjured up a suitable reply, an interesting question, I found myself saying farewell instead to a disinterested stranger.

What to say? I'd seen what they'd done to Miller…they'd chewed him up and spat him out faster than he could muster up the chance to show even the quietest glimpses of his true potential.

_Jim…_the recollection shot a dose of pain through me that almost left me crippled, but Monroe had my arm. He hadn't even noticed.

"Hey…well look what we have here. It's little boy birdie!" One of the shorter men, whom I'd overheard was called George Luz, came up and administered a hearty clap to my shoulder. I nearly fell over from the force of it; a few of the men chuckled, the sound like cold water creeping over weathered pebbles.

"Aviary, you ass," Guarnere drawled over the length of his cigarette. It was hard to distinguish breath from smoke around here. "They keep birds in _aviaries_."

Luz was quick to retort. "_Shaddup_."

"Oi!" Another piped up, offering me a hand shake. "You're that jackrabbit from training ! I remember you! Fastest little shit they've seen in years if I remember right…that was you ain't it?"

I nodded, but kept close watch. My eyes stung as I scanned the gathering crowd around me. Blink and I'd miss them. Miss the predatory glances. The over-the-shoulder peeks. Behind the walls of my composure, my stomach was reduced to nothing but a labyrinth of hopeful knots. My skin was a quickly rising blush.

Men don't blush.

Men don't feel pain.

Men don't get knotty stomachs.

I swallowed back the heat pooling beneath my cheeks and attempted a masculine nod. "Yeah, uh," I replied. "Thanks. Jenkins yeah?"

"S'right…"The same man's dog tags, sure enough, read _A. Jenkins._ "Thomas Avery's got a good memory on him boys!"

"Remember every ass you've kissed to get in here then Bird-boy?" Luz quipped, a chorus of giggles following close after. "Though, I'm sure it wasn't too hard on ya! You're about rectum-high ain't ya chicken shit?"

My cheeks burned.

Martin, one of the staff Sergeants of the company, witnessed the new flush in my cheeks. "Aw, come on now Private we're just yanking on your chain a little."

Luz yanked me under his armpit, my helmet flying off my head and landing beneath someone's feet; he mussed up my short, dirty hair with his scuffed knuckles and buried them into my skull. The potent smell of body odor, gun powder and death overwhelmed me. Potent, but easily recognized. I wore the smell like an old, moth-eaten coat.

"Now, now, little fella, no need to get all teary-eyed 'bout a few jokes amongst brothers in arms!" Luz let me go and I staggered backward a step or two; a smirk popped up like a fresh spring blossom in the corners of his mouth. "A good ball-bustin' is good for you."

He continued his speech in the stern voice of our new C.O., Lieutenant "Foxhole" Norman Dike. "Besides! You're a soldier now, boy! There'll be no blushin' and fussin' in this company! Not under my command, no fuckin' sir! A paratrooper does his duty and he doesn't do it in no one's fuckin' foxhole! Now if you'll excuse me soldier! I've gotta make me a goddamn phone call!"

An eruption of raucous laughter followed the impersonation as I stooped to retrieve my helmet from beneath a fresh blanket of snow. As I bent, brushing the flakes of white off the bloodstained armor, I paused and watched a single fleck drift slowly down from the misty sky. It nestled into the fabric of my uniform and I could almost hear it breathe a gentle, frigid sigh of relief; its journey was over.

Something felt sharp inside. A shiver, perhaps, from the cold. Maybe hunger.

I raised my eyes to the thick gray clouds overhead. A melody began to lap against the empty spaces in my head.

_Come Josephine in my flying machine._

I trudged back down the uneven path that led to my foxhole, singing the ancient tune to myself as I went.

_Going up, she goes._

In one jarring motion, my helmet tumbled out of my grip and swayed to an agonizingly slow halt below; I fell back into the blanket of ice and dirt.

_Up she goes._

And pushed one lonely little tear into the back of my brain. Where it belonged.

* * *

The last words of my brother throbbed in my ears.

I could cite each phrase by heart. Every long-winded paragraph that eventually gave way to coherent thought in the midst of what was, back when it was penned, exhilaration mixed with a pint of pleasure and a shot fear. The messy scrawl of his hand across the time-worn page, limp and smeared and creased as old leather tucked away into my loosely closed palm, seemed to breathe against my skin.

The sentiment this letter chose to communicate was of love and comfort. Its intentions to stir hope where there was doubt, pride where there was sorrow. It was like gospel – every truth instilled faith, courage even, but not without leaving behind a scent of dread.

Mama felt the effects of the toxic fumes the most. When she had heard, she shut herself up in her room and didn't come out. Not until the stars began to ignite like white diamonds engraved in a black, sympathetic sky.

I smelled it too. Could smell it now, underneath the canvas cocoon that shielded me from the world above. It was strongest when I lifted it from the depths of my pocket, underneath the silvery shadow of the moon. Strongest when no one could see or hear or feel anything but the transient peace of mind that came bustling in with the in-between hours before a shelling. A Kraut spotting. More snow.

Late into the night, when the only sounds were of sleeping, of sought-after dreams and the rhythm of anticipation pulsating beneath the dying snow, I'd recite them. Murmur them into the hands of the bitter evening air as if to confide in them my secret shame, etch my guilt into the earth. They'd stitch his soul in the fabric of history. He'd be here…always.

I couldn't let the memory of him slip from time's ever-reeling mind, not after what had happened. Not after what I had done. He was the reason I was here. I, on the other hand, was another cause altogether.

The snap of a twig echoed outside. My ears snapped to attention and I could feel the muscles flex beneath tautened skin. Nothing came of the noise.

But before I could even relax from the first misplaced alarm, the cover lifted and an intruder slipped inside. I recoiled slightly as the suddenness of the unannounced entrance interrupted the closed-in silence.

A bone-chilling breeze wafted into the cove of warmth I'd been sitting under for nearly an hour, my coffee freezing over in my cup, food nearly untouched in the corner. In one hand, I clasped the letter, rendered to something like ink-stained rawhide after years of existence and exposure to sweaty, trembling hands. In the other, a syrette of morphine lay balanced in the dips and creases of flesh.

I looked over at my visitor and saw the sharply sculpted features set in a delicate, pale face. The Cajun medic. I remembered him well from Aldbourne, the first time I saw him, walking the empty streets with his hands fastened behind him. From Eindhoven, when we found ourselves dodging many a painted mouth after its liberation. From Nuenen, when I was working the Aid Station, before we were called into Bastogne. He and Spina brought in SWA's and LWA's off the front line, fresh out of battle, with his pale face smeared with dirt and ash and blood. I remember he looked tired, then. Always tired.

We were only acquaintances, spoke maybe once or twice outside of medical obligation, but his lasting impression haunted me.

I wish I could forget.

"How's that hand with a needle coming 'long?" Corporal Eugene Roe's soft, heavily accented voice reached out to me like a reassuring pat on the shoulder.

"It's coming," I replied, my head inclining as I stared long and hard at a syrette. Anything but look at him. Anything but acknowledge his presence."Hard to practice with not enough needles to practice _with_."

"Well, kid, that's all right. You'll get enough of it when you see your first bit of action," he said. "Reminds me...got any morphine to spare?"

I shook my head, gesturing to the syringe resting in the palm of my dirt-streaked hand. "Not a chance… down to my last four."

"Huh." He grunted, breath hitching as he shifted his body to access his bag. "No scissors either?"

"No, I don't got any. If I did I'd hand them over," I replied quietly, attention locked solid on the object in my grasp. "That cut healing up all right?"

Out of the corner of my eye, I saw the shadow of a distant smile flit over his face. A fleeting shard of emotion that just scathed the callused skin of his resolve to remain impassive, stay distant, but he wouldn't let the sentiments bleed. They stayed stubborn, steadfast, within their caverns of wasted potential, like the skeletons of once lively birds, or butterflies struggling to fly with torn wings.

"Just a pricked finger." He drawled softly, inspecting the mentioned scratch. "Nothin' to fuss over."

I could barely hear him breathe he was so still; it was unexpected, the words that followed after such frostbitten silence. "Well, Ralph's headed out to Bastogne for some supplies, scrounge up anythin' he can get. You bunk with Sergeant Lipton tonight, if you can."

"Why do you care who I bunk with?" I turned to face him for a moment, met the intensity of his gaze, and again withdrew like a whipped puppy. "What's it to you if I fucking freeze?"

A shot of discomfort ran like a current of tremors through my veins as I felt his eyes on me.

No matter how mild the man's manners were, no matter how softly he handled my emotions, my reactions, my sanity, Eugene Roe somehow unnerved me. He turned my nerves to sharp edges, honed them to an instinctive point. Made my insides curl in on themselves like burning paper. It wasn't fear, it wasn't distrust, it wasn't hate. The man was some sort of man-made angel; he made it impossible to hate him.

I didn't know what the hell it was that made me distance myself from him.

He was a man of few words, of quiet strength, and he kept himself at arm's length from everyone around him. But he approached them with offers of unspoken solace, like some sad-eyed saint draped in bloodstained hands and calming words like murmured prayer.

The sleeping forests of Bastogne were his chapel and these men…they came to him to save them. To let their blood flow through his fingers and cleanse them of their fear, their mortality, as if he could heal them of their infractions. Relieve them of their humanity.

He didn't belong here. None of them did. They lived and died to save the world… not for themselves, but for the ones they loved and left behind. I heard the rest of them talk of home – smatterings of mentioned brothers, of fathers, of old friends they remembered from the old times that should've still felt like the new.

At last, he sighed and his fingers brushed gently over mine; I trembled. His hand withdrew and a syrette of morphine was left behind. "Keep warm, Thomas, and the Sarge…he'll keep you safe."

As he left, another stroke of stark cold air rushed through after him, as if to fill up the empty place he left behind. His warmth dissipated soon after and I was chilled through and through again, like those ice pops I used to look forward to as summer began poking its head just around the bend back in Nebraska. When the fields were rousing from a long dormant winter and vibrant wildflowers peppered the lush green hills.

I missed those rolling green hills. The cows that lazed through the pastures and the foals that tripped over their gawky, bony legs. The smell of fresh paint that lingered around the barns, the gentle breeze that seemed to make those grassy knolls sing.

Nature's lullaby, mama used to call it. A cigarette and my music box that stayed put on the dresser my pa made for me when I was a little girl, all covered in dust and stale goodbyes…all I wanted in the world.

I could steal a smoke, but a music box…where in God's green earth could I find one of those? Not out here. Never out here.

With renewed resolve, I crawled out of the empty foxhole. The new snow nipped at my bare hands, soaked my knees straight through, and my stomach was as empty as a broken promise; I wasn't used to it yet, the hardships of war. Maybe I would never be.

It was all quiet as I tip-toed through the freshly-covered ground. A few snores startled me along the way, as I made my way through a row of foxholes filled to the brim with sleeping men, but my nerves unraveled as I saw a light at the end of the line – Sergeant Lipton and Denver Randleman sitting still as statues beneath mottled moonlight, the limbs of a tall tree casting eerie shades of grey over the pure white snow.

A light snore rattled the air; Randleman was fast asleep.

"Sergeant Lipton." I whispered to the unmoving figure.

He stirred, perhaps from a doze, and his head lifted slightly. "Yeah? That you Private Avery?"

"Yes, sir," I replied, my hands uneasily attaching themselves to the strap of my medic pack. "It's me."

Lipton moved to the right, making room for me to sit between them. "Thought I recognized your voice. Get in here quick, kid. You look half-frozen."

"Thank you, Sarge." My words splintered on chattering teeth and for the first time, since I staggered out of my lonely foxhole, I realized I was shaking so violently from the cold that my jaws had been clicking together, the sound kind of like a tractor engine with a stutter.

As I climbed in, the Sarge huddled closer to me, wrapping my arm around me and furiously rubbing my shoulders, inspiring some warmth to find its way toward his hands as if they were compasses fashioned out of skin.

"You all right?" He asked, his mild voice cutting through the brisk air. "You feeling any better?"

"Apart from surpassing a level of numbness deeper than three shots of morphine could ever hope to achieve, Sarge?" I paused for effect. "I'm right as rain. What about you? You warm enough?"

His chuckle felt like velvet against my bare ears and his breath, as it wafted past my petrified cheek, felt like a shard of yesterday, a recollection of the summer sunshine I felt long ago, before any of this happened. Before I even knew what war was. "Warm as I'll ever get out here in this hell hole."

"Permission to speak, Sarge?"

"Sure, Private." He replied, his voice barely above a whisper. "Whatever you want."

"This ain't hell, Sarge. It can't be," I replied, feeling the heat begin to saturate me in its guarding shell. My eyes grew heavy. "It's too fucking cold."

He almost laughed aloud.

Almost.

* * *

**SWA **and **LWA **- Severely wounded in action and lightly wounded in action.


	3. Chapter II: Red

Author's Note: Again, an enormous thanks to **Sweet A.K**. If it wasn't for her, this story would have so many mistakes and it would not be funny. Still working on ch. 6 as I write this...it's a bit of a bugger, this one, because of the emotional intensity, but I'm almost done with it. A chapter for a chapter...post one and end another.

Disclaimer - I don't own Band of Brothers or its characters. Just my OC.

* * *

CHAPTER TWO;; _Red_

* * *

"_MEDIC!"_

Bombs. Nothing but bombs. And out of the bombs, shrapnel was born.

Gore and guts and chaos spilled over the pure white ground like afterbirth.

I dodged bullets, I dodged fire. I skirted the edges of the trees and pushed through the darkness to find the voice. _God_, the voice. Make it stop. _Make it stop. _

"_MEDIC !" _It was getting closer. A little further now. Just a little further.

"_WE NEED A FUCKING MEDIC!"_

Slide to a halt. My knees scraped against permafrost. "I'm here!" My mantra; I recited it like clockwork, drowning out the sound of the wounded cries."I'm here." Claustrophobia set in as the soldier beside me grew into a crowd. "Get the fuck out of my way!"

He left. No use, he mumbled. No use…he's dead.

I muttered to myself as I assessed the damage. He's not dead until I _fucking_ _say_ he's dead.

God, the blood. I'd never seen so much of it. Never knew the body carried so much liquid weight.

The soldier wailed as another surge of agony chewed through his resolve. Help. _Please. _Where the hell was Roe when he was needed?

Fuck the Cajun. I could do this myself. I could do it. I could-

Another scream. How does one think under such conditions?

Morphine first. Morphine. What was morphine again? _Get rid of the pain. Ease the shock. _With shaking hands I traced the inside lines of my pack, groping blindly for the thin form of a rogue syrette beneath my fingertips. There. My palm arched around it.

"I wanna go home…" The man's hands searched for his stomach. He panicked when he found it missing, only slime and death and pain meeting his touch. "I wanna go home. Please…please I won't do it anymore! I'll never do it again! Just let me go home! Please! _Please!_"

I grabbed the man's blood-drenched hand and held it tight until my knuckles waxed tickled pink and a hopeless shade of white. He whimpered, he sobbed, he twisted into shapes I couldn't name. Two stabs of morphine, a few words that wished they could feel like console, but fell flat and cold against him. The drugs eased an otherworldly pain that human hands couldn't reach, couldn't feel.

Tears formed in my eyes. _You'll be okay. You're going home. You'll be home soon._

He looked up at me like he believed in the echoes of my empty promise. His eyes were alive. He'd make it. He'd pull through.

_You're going to be okay. I won't let you die._

I couldn't breathe as I hurried to put him back together. Intestines grabbed me and wrapped themselves around my arms like worms of the earth. Tried to pull me down. Pull me back. _Stop_, they murmured. They sounded Cajun. Their voice was deep. _There's nothing you can do._

Too many pieces…too many holes.

The light was a trick.

The Red's last laugh.

There was no life left.

When I looked back at the pale eyes, the ash-riddled features, the face of my dead brother stared back at me.

* * *

I didn't save one that night.

Not one.

By dawn, the woods were quiet. Hoarse coughs passed intermittently through the company as they sat huddled in groups, their hands in their pockets, trying to salvage some warmth, and their eyes fixed on their boots. A few mentioned the cold. Others stayed silent.

It had been my first attack. I survived, walking out of the devastation with nothing but scraped knees and disappointment to show for it. So this was combat. This was war. No one ever said it'd be easy, but no one ever said it'd be this hard. Maybe they didn't mention it for a reason…if I'd known, I'd have walked away. Thomas…he would have stayed.

I sat between Sergeant Martin and a very scraped up Malarkey. He pulled a carton out of his breast pocket and offered a smoke to every man in our small cluster. A lighter clicked next to me; I waited my turn, flipping the white paper body over and over again, staring off into blank distance.

"Light?" Malarkey asked. He held up the lighter to the end of the stick.

I sucked in the first drag as if it were my first breath of air, continuing to nurse the nicotine while it burned away.

He offered me a crooked smile and I took it gratefully.

As grateful as he was, perhaps, when I shoved him out of the way of a close call with a shell. But that wasn't salvation. It was accident, happenstance. I'd been running too fast a pace for my own feet to follow, answering a call for a medic. My ankles clicked, I was launched into open air with nothing but gravity to catch me. Malarkey did instead; he didn't have enough time to get pissed off as a shell exploded in the exact spot he'd been standing just seconds before.

I could save a man by accident, but I couldn't save a man on purpose.

Sleep called to me. I stood up and dragged cold, weary feet through the hard sludge. Where was my foxhole? I'd begun to forget. They all looked the same to me. Same shovel-carved shapes, same sprinkles of snow, same helmets and ash and cold. I was ready to just sit in any one of them, the first one that caught my attention, before Spina came charging toward me. A bull seeing red crosses.

I'd almost forgotten the cigarette hanging limply from the corner of my lip.

"Avery…" He caught my shoulder.

I looked up, plucked the smoke from my lips; it stuck for a second, then let go.

"C'mon, kid. You're headin' up to Bastogne with Roe."

I stared up at him, my eyes narrowing. "Why?"

"Cause I said so," he retorted curtly. "That's why."

I balked. "Why's Roe goin'?"

"One of our boys took a shot to the leg. He's taking him up to the hospital stationed there….gettin' some supplies too – food packs, bandages. You're goin' with him. Help him out."

He placed an arm over my shoulder. It hung there like a dead weight; he was as tired as I was, I could feel it in his every step, each step that led me closer to the rumbling of a purring engine. "Get yourself a hot meal as well, all right? The coffee's a little better up there…some of that too. It'll make you feel better. I promise."

"Really I'm fine-"

He pushed me gently toward the car; it sputtered and chattered behind me. The spark in his hazel eyes turned dark. "Fucking _go. _Roe's waiting on you."

In an instant, he left. His boots crushed the infinite snow, beat it into the dozing soil. Resigned to my fate, I turned. Turned to find an offered hand and a pair of dark eyes staring down at me. Images from the long passed night ricocheted off the no man's land of my brain. I blinked away a stab of pain; the Cajun's face dredged up rotten memories, the smell of decay almost tangible in the morning air.

"It's all right, Thomas," Roe said softly. "C'mon. Get in."

I took his hand and was lifted into the vehicle. Callus chaffing against callus.

* * *

Bastogne was nothing but a church and burning rubble.

Once, it was a town. A beautiful city. I could envision it, the bones of the structures still standing tall as sentinels over the fallen brick and rock.

My imagination painted the rest.

A baker on the corner, selling bread for a nickel. Whatever money was called here, the cheapest kind, that's what it was. Little one's would flock around the counter, a scuffle would break out amongst them, who would get the biggest share. The smell of cinnamon would entice them into a hush and their shares were equal. No one was left out, no one was left broken-hearted. The same children I saw in my vision were nothing more than casualties now. Numbers of the fallen. Survivors with stolen eyes and ash-streaked faces.

A seamstress had lived adjacent to the church. It was just her, no one else. She made every dress with the precision of a machine with just a needle and a spool of thread, no need for factories, not here. The fabrics weren't silk or velvet or the finest of cotton, but even out of wool she could fashion a jacket worth every bit that it is sold for. A smile always accompanied the purchases. They're always returned.

She stitched for an expecting mother down the street.

The same mother was dead.

So was the baby.

The seamstress.

Nurses and medics and surgeons crowd the chapel now. What was once a place of peaceful worship became a house of God full to the brim with desperate prayers. Healing hands pressed to feverish temples, trying to instill calm where there could be none. In the place of pews, there stood cots. Bandages replaced bibles.

Everything changes.

This town knew that well.

I looked over at Roe. His brow was knitted, every bit as silent as he always was. Dark eyes swallowed up the light that found its way into their ensnaring color; no reflection found there. I couldn't even tell what shade they were. Brown or black, I couldn't say.

The vehicle screeched to a rushed halt and Roe jumped out. A scattered few bustled around the stretcher, the man lying on it perfectly still.

The Cajun turned to me, only a moment to spare. "There's hot food right over here." He gestured to one of the last buildings standing in the little town, a squat, square edifice that proudly rose over the black smoke and ash. "Get yourself some coffee or such…make yourself comfortable."

He began to follow the medics into the church, but afterthought tore him back toward me. "And don't you go wanderin' nowhere, all right now?"

In an instant, he was gone. Another voice brought me face to face with an old woman. Imagination told me she was the seamstress who sewed for new mothers and country daughters. She may have been just a farmer's wife, a victim of lonely rural subsistence. But I wanted to believe she was more than just a dirt-streaked face. A pair of fearful eyes.

"Please," she beseeched hoarsely. She fisted her hands in my uniform, as if she were in pain, as if I were her last hope. "Please, some bread to spare?"

There was a food packet left in my sack; my attentions locked on her, for a moment she was the epicenter of my world. Absently, slowly, I reached for it, dug it up from the bottom where it lay untouched. I'd been saving, rationing, but she needed it more than I did. She'd suffered more than I had.

"Here…" I held it out to her and she snatched it from my hand. Her breath grew shallow. "Take it. It's…it's all yours."

The woman, in return, slipped a book into my arms and wandered away. A bloodstained bible…a commonplace treasure.

I watched her go, a labored amble back to the pile of rubble she called home. There, she drifted to the ground like a paper-thin leaf. Only there did she seem to calm, appear to feel safe.

After she'd gone, I placed the bible in my pack.

"Thomas."

Roe's drawl rocked back and forth in my ears like a southern lullaby. The lilt that softened the edges of my name brought to mind a tranquil scene, a rocking chair swinging like a pendulum on a rickety porch. It was nestled deep in the heavy heat of the Bayou, darkness erasing the watercolor sunset.

"Thomas," he tried again, tried to find me amongst the ash. The rubble. I blended in with it, became one with the destruction. What could I do to help them?

"Come with me, kid." He uttered the phrases quickly. "Let's get some food, huh?"

I turned away from the heart-rending scene and followed the Cajun toward the makeshift mess hall. It'd been a bakery before the town's demise. I wondered if the air would taste like burnt cinnamon. If the veins of the walls would hold the laughter of little boys as they tugged hard on little blond pigtails. Thinking of it made my stomach do somersaults. Maybe thinking wasn't such a good idea.

"I remember the first time I had to open my first pack of sulfa," Roe mused aloud, as if to himself. The muscles threading through his neck contracted as he swallowed. "Bandaged my first real wound."

"What happened to him?" I prodded.

He didn't say anything more. I didn't bother asking either.

Soup was the best they could do for us. Roe was a shepherd, balancing a tray of soup bowls and leading his flock of one to a picnic bench near a streaked glass window. There, he sat. I followed suit, taking the chair across from him; he was already spooning mouthfuls of potatoes and beef into his mouth before I even settled in.

For a long time, or what seemed a long time and was really only five lazy minutes passing by, we ate in complete silence. The only sounds that passed between us were slurps and hisses of pain from eating hot food too fast. Mostly from me, of course. Roe was the picture of quiet suffering; the only sign of pain in him was a purse of his lips and the deepening of a thoughtful scowl.

I was done before him, the last of the broth still lingering on my tongue while his bowl still remained half-full. He must have felt me staring as he looked up from his crude excuse for a spoon, his jaw still moving almost musically while he chewed.

"It was you last night," I said, melting into the table. I perched my chin on my forearm, relaxing on the recommendation of warm fingers and a full stomach. "You were the one that…that was talking to me. Told me to let go. Wasn't it you?"

He simply looked. Didn't speak, didn't shrug, didn't move. Just chewed…that's all.

"You don't talk much do you?"

His eyes flickered upward again, fixating on me. Swallowing sunlight, reflecting nothing in return. "He died."

Confusion struck me. "What?"

"The first time I saw real action, not just boot camp simulation…the first man entrusted to me, that I took under my care," he clarified. "I drug him a hundred feet, headin' toward cover, before I realized he was dead."

A pause. A misplaced sadness in the midst of sporadic laughter nearby.

"You get used to it, Thomas…" He told me. "You get used to death."

There was something in his face, in the painful lines that formed like parenthesis around his mouth, like postscript, an intentional tell. It told me he was lying.

He knew it too.

* * *

It was night again.

The effects of my first good, hot meal in weeks had worn off and my fingers were frozen through again. Roe was outside company lines scavenging again. Moore had been sent to Bastogne for a sudden fever. God only knew where Spina was, but I'd heard his name thrown around casually a few times, from foxhole to foxhole. Around lips holding onto cigarettes and over leftover food packs.

I couldn't sleep. No matter how hard I tried, the picture of that man's face, tearing apart at its seams in immeasurable anguish, kept stealing before my eyes every time I closed them. Before long, I was afraid to blink. Afraid to see my brother's features melt into the nameless man and take his place. The sound of footfalls on old snow was a welcome interruption; I leapt to my feet, leaving my empty foxhole behind.

Voices began to shoot through the halls of the trees, whizzing by like whisper-thin bullets. One sounded like Lipton. Familiarity lured me toward the scene.

"Sergeant?" I called, keeping my whisper low. The snow crunched loudly beneath my boots. "Sergeant Lipton?"

"I'm here, kid," he replied, from somewhere on my right. My head snapped toward the noise. There he was, sitting with his back against a tree; I detected strain in him, I felt him _hurt._

I rushed to him, kneeling before his exposed leg. Blood glistened in the moonlight, grinning up at me like the devil, red as sin. "What happened?" I leaned forward, lifting the strap over my head. "You all right?"

"Tore my leg open tripping on a goddamned stump in the dark," he replied, and hissed a little as I bent and poked around the wound to inspect the damage. The cut was deep; it would need stitches.

My heart sputtered and stopped for a moment, but necessity revived it. "You'll have to get this stitched up, sir. It's no shallow scrape."

"Can you do that?" He asked.

I shook my head, then seemed to remember it was dark. "No, Sarge. Never was good with needles," I fished through my pack for a bandage to stop the bleeding. I had no tweezers, no sulfa, no goddamned thread. As if I could stitch it up anyway; I wouldn't be able to. "I can bandage it up, but I'm clean outta sulfa."

More footsteps approached from behind. They were too heavy for Roe's light, quick gait. "Doc?"

"Avery," I replied.

Spina bent down next to me and went through the same motions. Lift the strap, open the bag, fish through the contents. I took a peek into his supplies and saw packs of sulfa; Lipton was in better shape with him. More capable hands…ones that could probably handle a needle and a spool of thread.

"Go on back to your hole," he assured me. "I've already got this handled. Get some sleep, would you? You sound like hell."

I retrieved my bag and left. There was no use protesting what I already knew was a lost cause, at least for me.

Back to the foxhole, where I leapt into the inky gloom, half of me expecting to fall forever. The moon had shifted since I'd left and there was no more light shed in my shallow grave. Complete blackness met my eyes as I stared ahead, looking for something solid, something more than heavy shadows. There was nothing; I could find no shreds of light down there.

Sighing, I rolled onto my side and swallowed hard. There was the face again, engraved into the canvas of the gloom. The silent screams, Thomas' soulless face as clear as the day I watched it pale and grow cold beneath my desperate hands.

I squeezed my eyes shut; something felt shredded, as if it would spill out of me if I didn't close myself up completely. If one hole wasn't plugged, I'd escape myself. Leave my body. Where would I go? There was nowhere to run, only holes to hide in.

Tears came. I didn't stop them this time.

_Balance yourself like a bird on a beam._

Lyrics came to mind, familiar ones, they smelled like home. Like newborn grass and wide open spaces.

_In the air she goes!_

No foxholes. No shellings. No bullets.

_There she goes!_

No wasted youth. No more brushes with the Red.

_Up, up, a little bit higher!_

I sang them, balanced them on a trembling voice, and shoved them into my ears.

_Oh! My!_

Drowned out the image that flashed before my eyes.

_The moon is on fire!_

Sang them underneath shaking breaths.

_Come Josephine in my flying machine._

Over the fleshy knolls of my scraped up knuckles, my frost-nipped fingers.

_Going up, _

Wept as the faceless man and Thomas' name fused together, one long ribbon of blood unraveling in the snow.

_all on,_

And fell asleep to the resonance of Josephine's gentle farewell, the bible cradled in my arms.

_Goodbye!_

_

* * *

__If you're wondering what "The Red" is, then here's your answer - Death.__  
_


	4. Chapter III: Blue

Author's Notes: Thank you so much to** Sweet A.K** for being the most awesome beta! :D

Disclaimer - I do not own Band of Brothers or its characters. I only own my OC.

* * *

CHAPTER THREE;; _Blue_

_

* * *

_

I transitioned slowly out of an uncomfortable dream.

One that felt like brambles beneath bare feet or fragile bones against cold stone. I didn't care for the moving picture that moved through my mind, like a night out at the theater, five cents a ticket. I walked out. Walked through the beaten paths of unconscious musing and out of my head and back into darkness; I'd already known it'd be dark. It was like a sixth sense now, knowing when it was cold and when it was dark and when it was time for food. It grew on all of us like time's parasite.

For a few moments, I simply breathed. Sat there and tried to remember what sunlight looked like. Pure sunlight, not this filtered, corpse-gray luminescence that we were given here. The kind that reflected off blades of grass as if the hills were sprouting emeralds from the womb of its nurturing soil. I missed that sun. Where was he now? Back in Nebraska maybe.

There was nothing to do but sit and wait.

Wait for dawn.

For food and coffee.

For the Red.

My half-frozen limbs would drink to that.

I tried to move. Something very firm and heavy was sitting on my jacket. I turned to see a hunched over figure next to me, a gasp bubbling up in the narrows of my throat, but I swallowed it. It tasted metallic.

"I need you to come with me," came the soft tendrils of the Cajun's voice. The night was too blind in its old age to shed any illumination on his expression, on the sharp angles and pale planes of his face, but it felt strained as his intonation reached me in this pit. "Gotta go on over to third battalion before dawn, find some more bandages if I can. You're comin' with me."

I could say I was too bleary-eyed, too steeped in exhaustion to question him. But that'd be lying. Curiosity plucked me out of that hole and had me following his deathly quiet footsteps. I'd forgotten where the battalion post was, so I just trailed behind. The shadow of the dark-eyed shepherd who weaved in and out of the forest trees.

He stopped. It was so sudden, his halt, that I nearly collided with him as my brain struggled to imitate the action. My feet buried themselves in the fresh snow. It was nearing dawn now, the face of the sky beginning to show a little color in its cloudless features. I could see my feet as I looked down at them, waiting for Roe to remember his way.

Black.

With laces criss-crossing, rather slipshod, and ending in a rabbit-hole-loop at the lip.

I waited. And waited. And waited. Roe didn't move, he didn't budged from his spot.

"Doc?"

Nothing. Was he still breathing? Had he died on his feet?

Then, a flinch. Almost as if he'd taken a cruel blow to the cheek. "Tell me your name," he said. He was quiet, always quiet. I didn't think much of it.

It was the question that threw me off guard. "Pardon?"

"It's a simple question," he replied. "What is your name?"

"Thomas Avery." The answer was like second nature. Easy as blinking…I could do it with my eyes closed while I hopped on one foot, even in this ankle-deep snow.

"Your _real _name, boy."

Oh.

Oh, God.

The second those words left his pursed lips, my heart froze. All the blood in my body froze with it, as if the frost had finally found its way in.

All around us, the world moved on. It had grown bored with our stalemate. Dawn began to pick up its pace and above me the color had changed from a waxy sort of gray to pale pink. There was no fog, no smokescreen for the sun to hide behind today.

No falsehood. No lies.

The look in Eugene Roe's face shook every last fraying thread of resolve in me. _Tell me. _They said. _You can trust me._

"Please, Doc…"I couldn't speak it aloud. The forest might've heard. The trees would whisper. Murmur nasty little secrets into the ears of the soldiers back at camp. "Please. You can't…you can't breathe a word-"

"Where is Thomas Avery? Where is he?" He asked, taking a step toward me. His expression was terrifying, but I couldn't tell if it was anger that cast gruesome shadows across his pale face. The eyes were soft. Almost like dew.

Maybe…maybe he wanted to help.

_Maybe he knows he has to turn you in. _I took a step backward.

"I can't help you. Not if you don't tell me anything,"

Assurance. Eugene Roe was a master of the art of reassuring people…a true healer. Not just of broken bodies, but of lost souls. Perhaps he really was an angel, the red cross on his arm painted by the hands of God himself.

"Thomas Avery was my brother." The words spilled out of my mouth like water. I was filled with it, the water. It brimmed over and pooled at the corners of my eyes, warmed by the heat of my innermost fears as they burned like a brand into realization. "I'm his sister. I'm a woman."

His stare was incredulous. He couldn't _believe_ what he was hearing. "This is serious, kid…don't you be jesting with me-"

"It's not a joke," I replied, my arms instinctively pulling at the sleeves of my jacket. Duck and cover, hide, but please don't seek. _Please_.

Roe wasn't playing this game anymore. He was tired. Tired of chasing my elusive answers through the snow. Tired of this war, maybe. Tired of the blood of his fallen comrades that he couldn't get out of his hands, no matter how hard he tried. He could never forget them. Their pain, the last moments of their life, it was written on his face. He was nothing more than a relic of the men he couldn't save. The ones that couldn't make it, no matter how hard he tried.

He wanted out of this hell. He wanted truth and answers in a world that gave him only guns and orders. "Prove it."

My breath was ragged as it was drawn out by necessity, nothing more. I didn't want to breathe; I was too shaken, too anxious to want to do anything but beg him for forgiveness. For fearing him, for molding him to fit the empty exoskeleton that was my brother. He wasn't Thomas…he was Eugene Roe. The shepherd, the angel, the healer. The Red's opposite in every way. Instead of taking away, he gave in return.

Behind its cage, my heart rattled in my chest like loose shingles on an empty house. He was the wind, making them flutter and snap and echo, making them detach and fly into his death-stained hands. His elegant fingers. My life was there, hanging in the balance.

He didn't say a word, just stood there and waited. Waited for proof, the truth, that he thought wouldn't come. But no one could hear us. In an empty clearing, we were alone. This was our secret and ours alone to keep.

I was resolved. There was no turning back after this. After this, there was a new path to be taken, and the other would be erased from existence.

One step forward. And then another. It wouldn't be so hard. Perhaps they would aim for my temple, make it quick. Maybe my heart would be the target. It didn't matter. I was going to die, the Red nearly had me in his clutches and he was growing impatient with waiting my turn, but I'd known that for a long time now. An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth, a hand for a hand. My life for my brother's and fate was even.

I took Eugene's hand. It was cold beneath my fingers, but warmth throbbed underneath, hidden by shrouds of winter. He didn't speak, didn't utter one word, but his breath spoke volumes. It hitched, catching on surprise, as I guided his palm into the billows of my shirt, the one that never quite fit me. His pupils dilated. His cheeks flourished with red blooms of heat.

His hand was on my chest. It curved around the form of my breast, soft, raised skin that bristled at his touch. And he felt something there that shouldn't have been, not if I was lying. Nothing but candor, in its purest form.

I shook, but not with cold. Humiliation. Revulsion.

I tried not to cry as I held his hand there, held it captive in its place. "Is that proof enough for you, Doc?"

He nodded absently; I let him go. He looked away from me, maybe a little embarrassed himself, but he hadn't been struck completely dumb by the revelation. "You don't look like no woman," he said. "You're…just a kid. A little girl playing dress up."

Watching me shivering seemed to put him on edge. He took off his stained, tattered coat and perched it on my shoulders. The material was still warm from his body heat. "It's all right, girlie," he said to me, a mutter, a gentle promise. "I'll try and get you home somehow. You can't stay here. It ain't safe."

"There is no home," I replied. I didn't dare asking him how he knew...how he figured out my secret. "I can't go back."

He just looked at me. A bitter, tired sigh escaped him in little tufts of cloud. "C'mon, now." He escorted me, his hand on the small of my back. Just like a gentleman. "Let's go back and get some shut eye. It'll be daybreak in a minute or two."

And it was almost daybreak. The sky was blue now, no longer pale, no longer ice. Light began to steal over the borders of the sentinel trees and illuminate the white world in gold. It sparkled. Everything looked like painted glass.

We were almost there. Back to foxholes and waiting and watery coffee.

"My name...my real one," I told him. "It's Kate."

And just as he looked over at me, the sun broke through its confinements, it leapt up into the empty heavens from behind the horizon. His odd shade of blue-black hair was drenched in the blinding light, almost like a halo.

It was the first time I'd seen his eyes and they weren't black or brown at all…

They were blue. Dark, stony blue.

* * *

Somewhere, somehow, I heard my name being called.

When I opened my eyes, the sunlight was gone. His visit had been transient, fleeting, and now the fog had taken his place. No, they couldn't be, could they? …snowflakes. The gray and white smears, like finger-paints, were clouds.

"Avery?"

My name was morphed into an insistent softness. A sort of spoken velvet. Like a mother would murmur to her child. Like kittens kneading human bellies – gentle, loving, comforting.

His face came into view. I could almost cry for joy. But I'd sworn off crying ever since I made the transition from reckless young girl to soldier with the red-cross band. I didn't know when, but it had happened. Probably when Eugene Roe's hand rested against the raised marks of my secret shame, the scars I'd been born with, the scars that I hid away.

Soldiers didn't cry.

Soldiers only died.

I was the medic.

What did that make me?

The dying type?

Or the running type?

Maybe I was allowed to cry after all.

Lipton's v-shaped scar blurred as I clamored out of the foxhole to greet him. "Avery, what are you doin' all alone over here?"

No answer. Just flying arms that landed on the strong pinnacles of his shoulders. I locked him in an embrace that was perhaps against regulation. Who cared? He didn't seem to. He held on too.

"I'm so glad to see you Sergeant Lipton," I buried my nose into his collar. It smelled like dusty ice and rotting gunpowder.

I could feel his cheek wrinkle into a smile against my ear; it was infectious. I caught it too. My toes ached from bearing all my body weight, so I let him go and returned to semi-sold, at least stable, ground.

Lipton clapped me on the back and herded me toward a group of laughing men. At least they laughed. It made them all the more beautiful, all the more real, not just statues of honor. Patches and decorations of rank stitched into vacant uniforms.

"Well look here boys ! If it isn't our little jackrabbit escaped from the company hut!" George Luz's comically accented voice rose up over the wave of tittering giggles that spread throughout the men. He scooted over a bit. It was a wonder these boys didn't have splinters the way they dragged their bodies over the stumps, the logs, that served them well as seating habits. "Get over here and sit that bony little ass down for a bit! Take a load off, pop a squat!"

"I'mma pop a squat in those beans if you don't shut the hell up and let me eat in peace," one of the soldiers, Malarkey, growled. The rest slapped their knees and wheezed and laughed. I was beginning to fall in love with just the sound of their chorused chuckles, the spontaneous combustion of their mirth that stoked the fires of their bonds. Kept them warm and lively and strong.

"No carrots, I'm afraid," Luz continued, ignoring Malarkey's threat. "Looks like cold army slop will have to do."

He handed two tin cups to the Sergeant. Lipton passed one to me. Between the two men, there was enough heat to reach the marrow of my frosty bones. I sighed into my spoon; it stuck to my lips.

"All right boys," Lipton's words thwarted the levity. But it was a welcomed interruption. "Let's keep it down."

"Yes, mother." A mocking reply.

More cackles.

The sergeant wrinkled his nose disapprovingly as if to say it was useless sometimes. Just plain old useless. They were like a band of rowdy children and he acted the part of the tired, yet steadfast mother. Loving, but sometimes commanding and petulant in her ways.

The dynamics of brotherhood never ceased their constant evolution.

Ever-changing,

Ever-building,

But never forgetting their foundations.

The place of their origin.

"Hey Avery." This one was unfamiliar, but it sounded genuine. I craned my neck over Luz's thick mop of disheveled brown hair. A transition into dark eyes, young and warm and unassuming, met me there. John Julian. I could recall him from some disjointed deposit of memory, but I didn't know here it came from. It just…was.

"I got this fuckin' itch in my fingers…" He talked. I listened.

I got up and crouched before him, inspecting them closely. They shook as I turned them over and over in my hands. "Irritates like a son of a bitch. Got any idea what it is?"

"This here's frostnip." I replied, releasing him from my grip. "It's the onset of frostbite, just superficial damage that'll heal up pretty quick if you keep your fingers warm. Put them under your armpits and they'll be all right. Try not to use them too much."

"Yeah," he snorted, but did as he was told, burying the dying appendages underneath his arms. "Right. Thanks doc."

The commonplace medic nickname struck a bell in me. It didn't hurt, but it didn't feel too good either.

Numbed, I rested my hand on Julian's shoulder for a moment. He looked up at me and gave me a tight-lipped grin, a thanks for the diagnosis. _You're swell doc, real swell. _He said it silently so that no one else would hear but me.

My fingertips slipped and fell off the swell of his arm. I moved out of the group. As I raised my gaze to the horizon, a bent figure, its back to me, caught my attentions. Something thicker than frozen breath wafted up into the atmosphere. A smoke. God, what I wouldn't give for a smoke.

I'd trudge through calf-deep snow and a few feet for one. That was for certain.

Roe appraised me over his shoulder then smiled a little. It was a rueful expression, one that bore too much weight to be considered mirth, but was beautiful nonetheless. He sucked a deep breath out of his cigarette as I eased down next to him. On the surface, he didn't seem to mind the company. So I stayed.

"Care for one?" He asked. Must've been his streak of southern hospitality rising to his exterior.

"Probably kill for one," I replied. He passed one over, palm-side up. His index finger was an angry shade of red. "Doc, hold on a second there. Let me see that hand."

He offered it over to me. I looked the finger over, worry pinching my brow almost painfully. It was just a cut, sure, the same I'd asked him about three days before, but goddamn if it wasn't infected. I was surprised he hadn't noticed. Just by looking at it, my own finger gave a right good smart in sympathy.

"Didn't you notice this was infected?" I asked. He glanced at it.

A shake of the head, an exhalation of smoke. "Can't say that I did."

Practice what you preach, my pa always said. I told myself I was a medic. Over and over and over until the idea became something more than just intangible concept. If I was a medic, if I wanted to save lives, I had to start small. With frost-nip and sore fingers.

I reached for my bag and pulled out a pack of sulfa and tore a piece off a clean sheet – the improvised bandage for a poorly supplied company. Roe balked.

"It's just a finger, kid," he replied. "A waste of clean bandages."

"It's practice. I need practice and you need your fingers," I retorted, dusting a pinch of sulfa over the inflamed slice. The rest I'd save for later. "I suppose we're at an impasse so let's just call it even."

I secured the bandage with a pinch of tape. "There. Good as new. Looks like you won't have to lose it after all, Mr. Roe, sir."

He chuckled, his lips twisting gracefully over his cigarette. "Well I'm much obliged to you, doc," he said.

My hands itched for the cigarette. It was just sitting there. Calling to me. Just waiting to be consumed by wracked nerves and a body running on a few sleepless nights. "Got a light?"

A flicker. A switch. The little flame danced beneath the white paper. Ignition.

Silence wasn't golden here. It was white. It was the in-between shades of gray that filled the hollow spaces when conversation tapered off and weaves of thought began to lace with the snow. Pretty little things, snowflakes merging with memoirs of home, in the Red's gnarled and twisted lair.

A pain in my chest erupted as I breathed in the smoldering air; I started to hum.

"Can I uh," he motioned toward me awkwardly. "Can I ask you a personal question?"

"I love personal questions," I replied wryly. He inclined his head; just a smirk, nothing more.

"You're always hummin' that same song," he said. "What's it called. Josephine."

"I do?" I looked over at him. The visual was there, but it didn't seem to reach my brain. "When?"

"Here and there," he calculated, thinking it over, then nodded as he decided that was right.

"I didn't even know I was doing it," I shrugged. "I guess I just...needed a piece of home for a moment or two. Remember things that aren't...this."

"It's a classic."

"Pardon?"

"That song you always singin'," he clarified. "It's real pretty."

"Wanna know something?" I waited for his assent, a sign of interest. The elongated shadows his furrowed brow cast over his eyes lifted as he fixed his attentions on me. "My father, back home, he's a trainer. Horses, that is. When I was a little girl, our best mare, she gave birth to a purebred Quarter colt in the spring. He was the prettiest damned thing I'd ever seen in the whole of my life; he was a dun, a real rich yellow color with deep black markings on his legs with a mane and tail to match. Pa, he didn't look too happy when the little guy was born, but I don't remember a time that I was so happy, you know? It was the first pony of the new batch and he was promised to me. I was going to train him up to be a good cowhorse when he got a little older...only, that was before he fell sick. Real sick."

"So what happened?" Roe asked.

"He died a few days after he was born," I answered, listless as the sensations of the old wound flooded back into the present. It clashed with the cold. "Anyway, my mama, she sang that song to me the night he was buried and it...it just calms me somehow." I paused, a mortified laugh stuck in my throat as I realized what I'd just done. "It's stupid. I-I shouldn't have told you that..."

He smoothed my ruffled feathers back down into some sort of half-hearted composure. It was hard to find true serenity out here, but Roe tried the best he could with what little he had to offer us. "We all have our coping mechanisms, kid."

"I suppose you're right." A thought struck me. "What's yours?"

"Rosaries. Prayer."

The old hush resumed its course between us, squeezed into the small amount of space that separated our half-frozen bodies. It heckled our restless feet, making them shift through the thinning layer of frost to escape the irritation of having nothing worth saying and little practice in the tactics of companionship to make the uncomfortable silence go away.

He finally found something. I had a sinking feeling he'd been circling the subject since I came over, evading it for some time before working up the courage to actually bring it up.

"You're making a mistake you know." Roe said, after half a cigarette. He'd flicked the ashes of his off long ago. He just sat there, his hands clasped together almost philosophically, as if they did his thinking for him.

I decided to humor him. "What mistake?"

He shifted his head vaguely toward the men, who were a little quieter now that I heeded the calm.

"Getting close to them," he said. "Letting them in. They're getting attached to you, and you to them. It'll only hurt in the end."

"It'll hurt worse watching them die knowing I never knew them," I blinked through the new film of snow falling from the swollen sky. "Knowing I never did what I could to keep their memory alive. Just cause I was scared it'd hurt me. Scared I'd lose them. It's worth the risk."

"I'm not saying it ain't right," Roe assured me. He sighed, a hopeless, hollow sound. "I'm just saying it's our job. We've gotta keep ourselves separate so that we don't hesitate when their time comes. So the rest don't suffer because of the guilt that eats up our ability to distinguish responsibility from selfish desires. Save one just to let another die. We can't afford to make mistakes."

He stood abruptly. "A dysfunctional medic does no good for them," he drawled shrewdly.

"It just makes letting them go even harder."


	5. Chapter IV: White

Author's Notes: Much thanks to** Sweet A.K** ! Her own story is quite amazing...you should go check it out if you don't already know about it! :D

Disclaimer - I don't own Band of Brothers or its characters. I only own my OC.

* * *

CHAPTER IV;; _White_

* * *

It was a shredded thing. Frail and weathered and wearing circle-shaped coffee stains on some of the leaflets. Like lipstick smeared on napkins after breakfast. But its words weren't altered by its appearance.

_In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth..._

The pictures which accompanied the ancient diction were lovely. Printed copies of the real thing, of real beauty, but still a sight for eyes rendered sore by nothing but white and patches of shallow crimson.

I didn't want to see the Red.

The Red meant goodbye.

I'd rather see white.

At least white stayed.

It breathed.

I'd had it a week before I recalled its untouched place in my bag.

Seven days. One hundred and sixty eight hours. I couldn't imagine feeling as secluded as it must've felt for so long.

The front leather cover was pitted, probably from sharp things that poked up from the ground while I slept, looking for spring and finding nothing but bare wasteland. Perhaps it'd had a birthday in the time it spent lying there, forgotten, shelved in the mental archives of all the things I'd discovered in my life.

_Happy birthday..._I wanted to make sure.

Just a glance told me it was older than I was, older than Roe, than Babe, than Luz. If it was older than Lipton, it had aged gracefully. Its wrinkles weren't as deeply carved as such advanced maturity, maybe somewhere in the middle, as they were beginning to form. In pages that had been caught in the rush of a quick concealment. An angry outburst that left it abandoned on its leaf-thin pages. It had never suffered indifference; everything bore the signs of healthy use. Fingerprints, tears, the loosened backbone, even loops and twirls of the name in the upper hand corner of the inside cover told me who it belonged to.

_To Ethel Delange, my darling, my life, my bride. Wherever I am, if we are ever separate, a part of me will always be here._

_Ethel. _The old woman in the street? My mind's stereotype of the envisioned seamstress? There was no way of telling for sure.

I turned it over in my hands. The spine grinned up at me through thick crow's feet, years of wear and tear shining in its faded gold print. Within the maroon coverings, the bindings were beginning to come undone.

And yet I derived such peace of mind from this hand-me-down book. I'd read the bible before, attending church services with mama in frilly, scratchy dresses and pin-curls balanced on the top of my head. But it was different now. I looked on it with changed eyes.

My pa bought me a pretty little one in town once, but I'd left it in my dresser. Caged to a life of lonely uselessness, a companion for dust-rabbits that scampered here and there. It was the color of pearl. I remember a strawberry jam stain on the first page, when I looked at it, grew instantaneously bored and chucked it into the top drawer for later. I'd gone outside and ruined my Sunday's best that day too; mama was furious as she clicked her tongue at the grass stains that would never, ever come out.

The bible was still there in that lonely dresser. So was the dust.

It was more than dust. Worth more than unused dressers. It was security. A comfort.

"What you smilin' at?"

I looked up from the page I was reading.

Roe came sliding in beside me. We bumped legs. Neither of us seemed to notice.

"Memories," I replied. "Old times."

"Is that a bible?" He asked. I placed it in his hands; they appeared more scarlet than usual. Imbued with the dried up rivers of blood that latched onto the skin like leaches. I looked at my own gore-steeped hands. Patches of crusted over attempts met my analysis. They never let go.

"An old woman in Bastogne, she gave that to me. In exchange for a food packet. A worthy trade, I think, for a treasure like this."

"It's beautiful," he crooned, sliding his thumbs over the discolored title. His eyes latched onto it, hungry, devouring every last ray of hope that he could find in the written devotional.

There was no mask of bravery in their appearance. It was removed and in its place a raw emotion seemed to pool in the depths of the dark color. Like pain, but muted. Nostalgia.

"Anglican?" I questioned.

"Catholic," he answered. His brow contracted painfully; he put it quickly back into my lap.

I gestured to his breast pocket. "You got any smokes?"

He sighed, pursing his mouth thoughtfully. "In my dreams I do."

"Do you dream?"

His teeth scraped the bottom lip. It turned white from the pressure. "Not anymore." He set his jaw forward. Decided not to linger.

Let it fester.

Let it the Red have it; let it die.

Always the consoler.

Never the consoled.

A matter of weeks. That was all it took. Erratic turns of conversations that often lead to nothing more than hearing the sound of his voice. Of him hearing the sound of mine. Little fragments of the man behind the healing hands and the omnipresent calm came into the light when I wasn't looking, but no sooner did they feel the weight of scrutiny, observe the presence of interest, they clamored back behind a wall.

A wall that none of us could conquer. I tried. The men had stopped trying long ago. Obstinacy wouldn't let me just give in; I had to know what was behind that wall. What he kept there. What graves lie still beneath the shadows of Roe's anonymity.

He built it up with distance and composure and soft-spoken manners that never seemed to escalate into anything more than lilted murmurs in the snow. He preyed on his own nature to survive on loneliness, slow self-destruction that ticked like a mind-made bomb inside his head. He salvaged solitude from hunting syrettes in the dead of night.

I knew nothing of Roe beyond the medic. The man I forged into my memoirs was founded on his one purpose in this life – to save. To heal. Never to regret.

Curiosity turned to questions. Questions gave way to broken answers. Intimacy began to swell between us, not like fire and passion and need, but like softness. The intimacy sprouted branches that grew more branches. A means of destroying the scourge of isolation became more than just one stem of the sapling. Leaves of trust and sympathy and concern. Of admiration and understanding and assurance.

Friendship.

He wanted it, craved it, needed it as much as I did.

I had it in them.

But he sought it only from me.

"What about you Catherine?" He formed the syllables in the undercurrent of his breath. Careful not to let it slip into unsuspecting ears. "How're you holdin' up?"

It was the first time I'd heard my name from him. My real name. It rolled through his accent, supple and doleful, spoken like true tragedy. I smiled at the recognition.

"Cold, hungry," I shrugged, the smile still clawing for purchase in the corners of my mouth. "Tired. Nothing I haven't been through before."

"Yeah, I hear you there," he said, nodding absentmindedly. Fingers fussing with a loose string on his jacket. His irises reflected moonlight as he then raised his head and examined the skies.

"You know Lipton's already the mother hen of the group," I promised him. "You don't need to play his part for him. He's got it down pat."

"No, no, you don't understand," he replied. "The boys, when they're not bleeding, when there ain't no shells or guns and there's food to eat and foxholes to take cover in, they're okay. They can rely on each other for everything. But you…you can't. You need someone to look out for you…the _real _you."

"So do you, Doc," The words were mumbled. They stuttered on the edges of impudence, skirting the borders as if they were too afraid to cross them. "So do you."

He didn't say anything to that. Nothing. I hoped it was because he knew I was right, not just more wordless evasion. But I didn't understand the mechanics of Roe's character. I didn't _get _him. He wouldn't let me. I still wanted to try.

"Look at you," he chuckled a little, his hand wrapping around my arm. "You're shakin' like a leaf."

I hadn't noticed. More important matters were weighing on my mind than just the monotony of physical suffering. It was an old hat now. Nothing new, just procedure

"It's colder than usual I guess. My body ain't used to it yet."

He was already digging through his bag before I'd even had a chance to finish what I was saying. The sound, contrasted against his quivering breath, clogged up the dry stillness of our foxhole with rustling material and shifting limbs. A dull thud. His boots had knocked together.

"What are you lookin' for?" I leaned into the commotion.

"This." He replied shortly. A thin blanket tumbled out of its tight roll as he held it up for me to see.

"Where the hell did you get that?" I cried, instantaneously jealous. He threw it over us. All at once I was bombarded with his heat in such close quarters; I could almost sleep. I was nearly there.

"Bastogne."

I should've known that. That's where everything came from. Supplies, orders, restored hopes, returning soldiers. They all came from Bastogne. I was beginning to believe the world was composed only of this lonely, frigid forest, buried in the midst of winter, and nothing beyond the ruins of the town existed. Nothing but the bare angles of the map. Nebraska was a place I only dreamed of. A figment of dying illusion.

"Doc?" His face was mere inches from mine.

The moon was bright.

I could see his skin.

Every detail.

He had freckles sprinkled on his cheeks like angel kisses.

They were hidden by his daily pallor, the mask of a beaten drudge.

But I saw them now.

Clear as day.

I quirked a hopeful brow. "Can I call you Eugene?"

It was the first time I saw him smile. Really smile. With teeth and lips and eyes that crinkled at their tired corners. No repression of sentiment, no burying of intent. I got a glimpse of the carefree boy that was rooted deep in the past, a ghost darting in and out of the summer swamps and the mottled-green banks of the Bayou.

He was there now, in the present Roe – the sad-eyed saint whose encounters with the Red one too many times had left him scarred and tarnished.

I thanked God that he was with me.

That he was our savior, our shepherd, our protector.

Our legionairre that fought against the Red.

I was glad that he belonged to us.

And us alone.

_God saw that the light was good, and He separated the light from the darkness._

* * *

It was night again. When they came. The bullets that fell from an unassuming sky.

Guns that catapulted us out of our foxholes. A few questions passed over the unit. _What the fuck? Did you hear that? Who's on patrol?_

No one could tell. They were all in silent uproar.

That called the boys to arms.

That slung our bags over our necks.

We waited.

Eugene didn't make a sound. A Cajun statue, framed in pale, freckled marble.

Every muscle in the company was wound up tight.

Like a spring, they waited. They prowled.

Another round. I could distinguish 10 different shots, some spawning cries. Fatality. Some ending in nothing at all.

"_MEDIC!"_

Eugene shot off like a rocket. I tried to follow. Follow him toward the cry. The cyclone. The chaos.

His face was stern as he heard my footfalls behind him. _Stay. Don't you move._

"_MEDIC!"_

Snow crunched beneath his cautious heels. It crumbled and flattened and died. Some of it caught in between the sole of his boots. But what did that matter? Men were dying out there.

"_MEDIC!"_

Somewhere beneath the trees that didn't have enough life in them to care, a man was writhing. Twisting. Trying to escape the anguish. Eugene would smooth his hair back, tell him everything would be okay. With Eugene, everything was okay. Even the last moments we spent on earth would be okay. Because it would be Eugene delivering us into God's arms. Not the Red. Not sorrow.

They didn't have the ability. We did, but here we were. Staying put.

Someone was dying.

And I was just sitting there.

We didn't hear anything else. No more shouts for medic. No more bullets. No more noise.

Just the forest that dozed back off into restful peace.

* * *

The bible was under my arm again. I found it there often. Almost all the time.

No one had died. At least, not on our side. The Krauts couldn't say the same, or so I heard in bits and pieces of hearsay as I passed semi-circles of soldiers. Fresh coffee had been made. Everyone had accumulated like moths to a flame around the pot to get their share. Tin cups rattled. Small talk came and went with the breeze that filtered in through the gaps in the trees. I passed the cook. He called my name.

He pointed at me with his rusty ladle. "Hey, don't you want any Private?"

"No, sir," I replied, wrapping my fists within the folds of my sleeves. "I've had enough coffee to last me the rest of my life I think."

Eugene was on supply scavenging duty. I haunted the crescents of motley soldiers, looking for Luz. He always had cigarettes. I needed one. Real bad.

"Luz?"

He and the rest of the guys looked up. They smiled and chattered and invited me into the conversation with open arms. Without inquisition. No curiosity in their smiles, no question marks that followed the currents of their banter. There were none to be asked. I was here because I had to be and because I wanted to be all at the same time. Conflicting emotions that could cause a cyclone, but only merited a whisper in return. It was simple, really.

I was here for Thomas.

For redemption.

But I was also here for Easy.

Question marks followed Eugene. I followed him. I was just a human form of punctuation at the end of him sometimes, trailing off into the ambiguous past that he never told me about and I never assumed to ask. Then, I'd be the answer. They were few and in-between, these occurrences. Usually when he went to Bastogne and came back with a numbness that dug deep into his eyes. Apathy laced with the gentler curve of a painful grimace. When he traipsed the snow, looking for scissors, for morphine, for anything, and returned red-nosed and sallow. Desolate and distant.

I plopped down next to the company comedian.

He gestured to the wrinkled, crimson cover of the book in my lap. "What's that?"

"A bible." I replied.

George snorted. "God, if only _I _could have known that," he deadpanned, but then motioned toward it again. "Why is it _there?"_

"I read it."

"You read the bible."

"Yeah," I said. "It helps me cope."

"Well _Amen _to that," George took a deep draught of his smoke. He didn't ask why...he already knew.

"You got any more smokes?"

"Sure, sure," he mumbled out of the side of his mouth. He'd just lit his. "Light Perconte's up while you're at it. I just know he's gonna ask for another one."

"And how do you know that, huh?" Perconte retorted, a guilty toothbrush in hand. "What, you fuckin' psychic now?"

Babe interjected. "Nope, still just psycho."

Luz scowled at him, but his focus was still on persecuting Perconte. "Cause you always have a smoke after you brush your teeth."

"I don't know why you bother." Toye waved a hand in front of his crumpled nose. "The rest of you smells like shit."

"You're one to talk," Malarkey said, hitting Perconte's bully over the back of the head. "You offer your fair share of the shit, Joe."

A miniature wrestling match erupted between the two men. It ended in beaming faces, no blood, no broken bones. Just camaraderie and casually tossed insults. Back and forth. A human seesaw.

"Yeah, yeah, it's really fucking hilarious. You're all a riot," Perconte spat at the snickering men around him. "We'll see who's laughing when all your teeth have fallen out and I'm snatching all the dames."

"Let us know how your first date goes, Frank." Luz quipped. I stifled a laugh behind puckered lips.

"Hey! Maybe you and Julian can double," Babe offered. "I've heard he hasn't seen action yet either."

"At least not the female kind," Muck added.

"Would you guys cut him a break?" Hoobler interrupted the steady stream of commentary. "He's only a kid."

Julian blushed; I gave him a playful nudge and a smile.

"I had sex before my balls even dropped." Luz remarked passively, missing the moment that passed between us completely.

"I was unaware this even happened yet. You have balls?"

"Fuck you Perconte!"

"Whoa, now. Don't threaten me with a good time!"

"Really? Are you fucking with me here or are you trying to make me toss my breakfast?" Luz flicked the dying embers of his cigarette before they burned his fingers . "It's not like we get enough to eat around here as it is."

"Joe's fucking starving us. He's holding out," Martin shook his head, salivating at the smallest reference to food. We all did. It was little more than a dream now. A long-lost luxury. Canned peaches sounded like a feast after months of rancid beans. "I know I smelled salted pork last night."

"Don't let Liebgott hear you say that," Malarkey admonished. "He might slit his throat. Then who'll cook for us?"

Muck mourned the very thought of it. "We're gonna fucking _starve_."

"Wasn't Winters a quaker once?" Toye asked. "He can cook. We'll have yellow snow cones and oatmeal instead."

"Winters isn't a quaker, ass-wipe," Liebgott came riding in on his usual arrogant swagger. A cigarette dangled precariously out of the side of his mouth; it bounced as he talked.

Martin piped up at the mention of this topic. "Guarnere said he was a Jew."

"Hey didn't you get your ass whipped over that?" Luz mentioned.

"I'm going to fucking _knife_ you, Luz."

"With what?" The shorter man got up off the log. I stayed put. "Your rusty piece of shit bayonet?"

"You bet your scrawny white ass."

"I'd like to see you try." Luz tore me from my seat, pushing me forward. In the confusion, I lost my cigarette and collided with Liebgott's square, burly chest.

I picked it back up, dusted the powdery snow off the lip and stuck it back in my mouth. It didn't feel so unbearably cold around the men. I'd lost the shivers that usually wracked me to the bones, especially when the temperatures dropped even further; my hands weren't in my pockets for the first time in days. And they were pink.

Not blue,

Not scarlet,

Not lily white.

_Pink_.

"Chicken shit," The Jewish soldier laughed. It was all a good jest to them. "Hiding behind the medic."

"Hey Avery!" Julian hollered after me as I ducked out of the combative ring of men. They all looked as the echo of my name reminded them I was missing. "Where you goin'?"

It was getting colder again. My hands nestled back into the folds of my jacket sleeves. "Find Sergeant Lipton."

Toye shook his head. "Good luck finding him. I heard he was up at CP."

"That's not what I heard." Perconte rebutted.

They all transitioned into different topics. The cold was among them, but once Liebgott had come marching in, they mostly just pestered him and offered him cigarettes.

For a while, I just wandered. Glided from foxhole to foxhole. They all had imprints in them, holding onto the shape of our bodies as if to remember them for when we died. No one even needed coffins. They could just throw us in our holes and the ground would open up its mouth. It would swallow us completely. No need for shovels. They wouldn't have to spend the last shattered remnants of resolve and energy of the living on the dead. The earth would take us in. It would shelter us from the cold as we rotted in peace.

The thoughts were moody. Dismal. But they happened to all of us sometimes. Dreary intervals between shellings and eating and smoking gave way to dreary rumination. We all thought about death, the Red. He was too near to ignore. He hovered over us, hungry, waiting. Watching. His influence spread like disease and before knew what we were thinking he was there. In our heads. What if it was our last day…our last word…the last time we saw our boys.

What if?

* * *

I found Lipton. It took the better half of an hour to reach him in my wasteful ambling through the hardening ice, but I discovered him in his foxhole. Spina was nearby taking notes on his inventory. It was a miserly number, but it was all he had.

"Sarge?" I sat back on the edge of his sanctuary. He looked up, his dirt-streaked face the picture of inner conflict. Thoughts that turned in on himself, reflecting an image that he may or may have not liked to see.

"Ave," he tried, blinking a few times. He shook his head. The image seemed to dislodge itself from him and he was there again. "Hey, kid. You're lookin' better."

"I can't say the same for you," I admitted sheepishly. "How's that leg? Can I take a look?"

He untied his boot and lifted up the leg of his pants. The bandage was old and brown and visibly water-damaged. A few rips in the natural direction of the wrap job suggested it might've been there at least before the last attack. Two days.

"Is that the bandage you came back with?"

"Yeah," he said. "Why?"

"It needs to be changed five minutes ago, sir." I phased into my medic persona. She told me to reach for my scissors and get that rubbish _off _before the wound turned gangrenous. "It could get worse if you don't keep it clean and dry."

"Aren't you guys short on bandages?"

"I've got enough to spare," I replied.

He stayed my hand. The one reaching into my pack. "How many, Avery." It wasn't a question; it was a demand.

"Five. I've got enough," I insisted. "Besides, Doc is going up to third battalion to get more. Please, Sarge, this could get serious if I don't change it immediately."

Satisfied with the terms, he allowed me to shear off the tattered cloth. Underneath, the gash was already turning an unhealthy shade of red. _Shit. _I opened my canteen and, after tearing the sheet in half, used the smaller portion to dab gently at the scarlet lesion. A sprinkle of sulfa followed it after I pat the skin dry.

"You came all the way over here to dress my leg then, huh?" Lipton smiled cheekily.

A smirk. I finished the dressing and held it in place with a generous amount of tape. "Of course," I said. "But I was wondering, out of curiosity, if there was any update on our position."

"Hold the line," Lipton replied. "Close the gaps. Stay alive. That's it."

"That's all?"

He covered up his leg. That was the only answer I got.


	6. Chapter V: Gold

Author's Notes: **Sweet A.K**, you're the greatest! Go check out her story _The Butterfly Effect. _It's fantastic! :D

Disclaimer - I don't own Band of Brothers or its characters. I only own my OC.

* * *

CHAPTER V;; _Gold_

* * *

Fire rained down on us. It broke through the wall of fog overhead and tore into the ground, making it bleed deep, warm earth that lay dormant beneath the frost. Another one exploded nearby; I threw both arms over my helmet just to keep it on in the midst of all this confusion.

Skinny was screaming. His hands wouldn't stop reaching for the shrapnel lodged deep into his leg.

"Put sulfa on that leg, Thomas!"

Roe's voice rose over the deafening blasts. He rifled through his bag with blind fingers and groping hands and God there was so much blood. There wasn't enough morphine to stop the screaming. We'd just have to think over it. It was our job. It was what we were trained to do…the steadfast pillars in a building crumbling all around us.

He'd told me to administer the morphine two seconds ago. No, make that four. It took two seconds to think in these conditions. I couldn't think. I wondered, dully, if Gene would hate me for that. But it was a silly thought.

Stop thinking. Save the leg.

Skinny told us to save it. Salvage it for someone who needed it. I couldn't think of anybody who needed it more, but really, all that tumbled through my cognizance at the moment was how my ears hurt and my hands were sticking to the frost (or was it sticking to me?) and my fingers just couldn't work fast enough to get this done.

"Fuck, Gene, I've only got two hands!"

His jaw was clenched tight. "Well use the goddamned things and help me out here!" He turned to Luz. "That jeep here yet?"

"It's comin', doc!" George shouted over the rumble of the endless detonations.

Spray of dirt and blood-stained snow crashed over us like waves.

Breakers of earth on the shores of filth and war.

George pressed his ear against the receiving end of the line. Roe and I were already gathering the rest of Skinny's unscathed limbs into our arms. "It's here, doc! C'mon, let's get him out of here! Move it! Move it! Let's go!"

A shell landed a few feet away from us as we struggled to balance his weight. The ground groaned beneath our legs and tried to shake off the pain like a wounded dog; Roe and I lost our footing. Skinny went down with us. He threw back his head and let out of a wail that no banshee haunting the rolling, green-hued mists of Ireland could ever attempt to match.

God, grant that my ears should never be the same after this. Deliver unto me mercy...that I should never hear the sound of pain again.

The jeep rolled to a stop in front of us. Roe bounded into the passenger's seat as Skinny was secured to the front by two men who had taken him from us. His eyes were fixed in a dark, distant stare. The feel of it penetrating every last piece of me was otherworldly. Haunting.

"Stay here!" He ordered. "Take cover and keep safe until I get back!"

I obeyed.

* * *

Days passed in successive blurs. One came, stayed a while, then bowed out before I knew it was even over. They all piled on top of the other, providing nothing new to mark the stagnant time, and so I forgot there was even daylight. That there was a moon. That there was snow.

Eugene's concern over the lack of morphine and proper bandages intensified twofold. I found myself waking up to an empty hole after his latest visit to Bastogne. Panic would churn in my empty stomach and I'd startle awake, claw my way out of the fissure in the earth. I'd look for him, call out his name in my head as if he could hear me, as if he would answer. Ten minutes would trace me in its outline. Then twenty. Only then, in the panic, did reality feel too close for comfort.

Sometimes I'd wake to find him in half-dug crevices, passing from hole to hole, shivering and begging for aid kits. The occurrence, at first pegged merely as a short-lived necessity, became routine. Over and over and over I'd wake and panic and seek him in the darkness. Part the curtain of gloom and try to find the lost shepherd. The protector needed protecting.

Something was coming loose. In both of us. Too much red, not enough warmth. I didn't want to lose him. He was the closest thing I had to family besides the boys.

And then there were the other nights.

The ones where I found him.

And he was by my side, his head caught in sleep's delicate web.

The fear would be gone.

* * *

Julian was dead.

Before dawn, I roused from a cruel dream. The same one, over and over, and I couldn't escape the reel. Julian. The shot. The strangled look in his eyes. Blood melting into the snow. The Red came. I tried to stop him, tried to deter his reason, but there was no other function for Him but to take. Never to give, but to steal what is ours. What is human.

Julian was dead in waking. He was dead in sleep. There was no escaping the reality of it. It just was and it would eventually come to _always be_. Twenty years wasn't enough.

The transition back into the conscious world left me breathless and I gasped for air as I crawled out of my old sanctuary. Find a new one. Move on. Survive. The ghost of our dialogues over boot camp and life after the war decomposed into the soil and I didn't go back to that mausoleum. The sepulcher. It was another beaten path behind me.

During those few days, Lipton often invited me to stay with him. Or I'd nestle between Luz and Martin and Malarkey, who were all more than hospitable when it came to human contact and warmth. Sometimes, I'd rouse from a shallow doze and listen to the sound of Luz's measured breathing. Martin's metrical heartbeats that thrummed in my ears like plucked strings. Lipton's gentleness surrounding me like a shielding husk.

All of them provided some variation of comfort as I bereaved the loss. They didn't know it, that they were filling in the holes his departure had left behind, and yet their presence left me feeling undamaged. Untouched. As if they had felt the pain before and recognized its specter in my mannerisms, my altered conduct.

Eugene had been right. It hurt. It hurt too much to care.

I'd push through. If I learned anything from these men, it was how to escape the quagmire. Let things go.

But Julian was still dead and I hadn't even heard the shots that took his life. It had been a combat patrol just the day before. He'd been young. Hopeful, even. Martin felt guilty. After delivering the news to the Captain, he had rubbed the deep creases of his furrowed brow with his thumb, holding onto an unlit cigarette as if it were his sustenance. His salvation.

Life had barely begun to bloom before his eyes. Now it was gone. Snuffed out like a burning candle whose wax hadn't even begun to melt.

Babe took his death the hardest. He'd been watching as the Red stole the boy's soul right out of his mangled body. He had been there. Unable to stretch out his hand and save him. Unable to move. Just watch him choke on his own life.

Straight out of the bedlam of gore and orders and the ceaseless shooting, Julian was taken away. The bullets just wouldn't stop coming. It wasn't his fault; they couldn't get to him in time.

The next morning, after the worst of Babe's period of grief had passed, we all wondered silently at the cure. I knew as I watched the soldier, dark shadows underlining the last vestiges of his guilt, crouch before Eugene and hand him a tin full of beans. The healer didn't even see him. He never ate a thing, even as the rest of us wolfed down as much as we could as fast as we could. Like it would be our last.

An announcement rolled in around breakfast, the bearer of good news in the form of Colonel Sink, who relayed a message from the top regarding our position outside of Bastogne – everything from the North, East South and West was stopped cold in its tracks.

Roe just stared ahead, battling some inner demon, wrestling some unseen entity. The food was abandoned. Everyone else commented on the latest enlightenment from our superiors. Whether it was too good to be true, to see the campaign in this icy fortress nearing its conclusion. Or just propaganda. A morale boost to keep us going.

I revisited our old foxhole. He followed me there, gravitating toward the abandoned shelter as if by the pull of a magnet. As if he knew too that we were both breaking somewhere. The cracks were reaching deeper into us. How do you fix something you can't see? Soak them into bandages? Patch them up with sulfa?

His eyes settled on me. I tried to breathe, but my lungs wouldn't open. They wouldn't take the air in. They were giving up, collapsing, caving in.

I didn't even feel it at first. The sensation of his arms enclosing around me. It was the sound of his voice in my ear that tore down the floodgates, let everything flow free. I was resurrected with a gasping sob, tears swimming before my eyes. I was dizzy, I was falling, but there he was. There to catch me at the bottom.

My fingers trembled violently as they searched for him. They snagged on his collar and fisted in the material that was cold and damp with falling snow. Like the old woman in Bastogne...like Julian. Dying alone.

_Oh! Say! Let us fly, dear_

Gene took the desperate hand into the calm.

_Where, kid? To the sky, dear!_

Hushed me with soft prayers as his fingers knotted and twisted and buried themselves in my hair.

_Oh you flying machine,_

He sang. Sang a song that exhumed from the graves of my past.

_Jump in, Miss Josephine._

_

* * *

_

He was there when I awoke.

It was dark again. I couldn't even remember falling asleep, but I could remember the daylight. Colonel Sink's message. Falling apart in his hands. It all rushed back so quickly that my head began to spin and I groaned, pressing a cold hand against my forehead to steady the spinning ground. Movement beneath me. No wonder it was so warm.

"You okay?" He asked.

The world was steady again. The trees, as I looked up at them, were still.

He took my hand and put something into my palm. "Here," he said. "Eat this. You'll feel better."

My fingers were so cold that it didn't warm. Whatever he had slipped into my grasp didn't feel anything but numb and cold. Nothing.

I stared ahead. My throat was dry. "I swear sometimes that you're an angel."

He didn't say anything. Didn't try to refute the accusation, the theory, whatever it was to him...perhaps it was nothing at all. Just description that didn't quite fit. Kept slipping when he tried it on. An image we all tried to box him into, make him make sense to us when we couldn't understand. But even our savior needed to be saved. He was just as human. His skin was cloth of the same kind we wore. His halo that used to blind me, used to carry me away into visions of angels and trumpets fashioned of gold, was just the sunlight reflecting off the snow.

Eugene Roe was a man that inspired a steady stream of prose. Beautiful was one. Fragile, another.

I knew this as well as he did. But there was no denial on his part. He just listened. Always listened. Even when we were far away, buried in the worries that our obligations entailed, he still watched. He still _heard_.

"You wanna know why?" I asked. I didn't wait for an answer; I wouldn't get one anyway. "Because whenever I'm around you, things feel different. Like I can tell you every horrible thing I've done in my life and you'll forgive me, no matter how terrible it was. No matter how much your heart sickens at the mere thought of it."

His eyes stayed on me. I couldn't tell what they were feeling, couldn't hear what they were saying, if their endeavors were to stay the prelude to my confession or to let them flow freely.

"You asked me a month ago why I was here," I began. "I never told you because I was guilty then. I was guilty of killing my brother because of a stupid, reckless decision that I made and that I came to find would change the course of my life forever. I watched him die because of me. His blood is still on my hands, Gene. Look at them."

I held them out. They were shaking. They were stained scarlet.

"I can't get them out. The stains. They're going to haunt me for the rest of my life." I didn't try to fight tears. Not anymore. "But the shame…it's gone. I can't find it anymore. When I think about my brother, about what I had done, about the life I ended, I don't feel the guilt gnawing at me. I don't feel it….I just feel…at peace."

I heard Gene's smile. I _heard _it. That was how audible the sound of its advent really was. Something alive in the midst of all these dead things. Dead men, dead trees, dying hopes.

"You've been talkin' to God," he said.

It wasn't an accusation, but something like relief blooming in the wake of the declaration. I looked at him. The smile was still there. I prayed that it would be permanent, but nothing out here was for forever. It was too fragile to survive the phases of eternity.

"Yeah," I confirmed his speculation. A tear fit perfectly into the curve of my jaw; it stayed a while, a dew drop holding on to the last breaths of night. "Yeah, I have."

* * *

All it took was a word. A step. A glance.

It could happen there. In the crevices of those little moments that we used to take for granted. A shelling. A bullet. A bayonet. And they were gone. In the middle of a smile or a goodbye, it could happen. We used to believe that in a moment, there were miracles. Little tendrils of beauty in the countenance of our embodied existence that flickered like stars. We all knew it now.

If anything was taken from this experience, it was our innocence. What little we had left of it, if there was any at all, was invested in the childish fairytales of conviction. That was a half-truth, while the ugly half waited in the shadows, a monster waiting for conception in the empty womb of encroaching war. Waiting to be born in the blood of battle.

Sometimes it was just misery instead.

The Red waited for no one. If I learned anything, watching the men suffer the cruelty of Bastogne, it was that there was no bargaining with Him. He waited on nothing. Not even hope. He decided when and where and how it was going to happen and there was no questioning why, no begging for another chance, no looking back.

It occurred to me, somehow, that he my have even had a voice once, a face, a soul of his own and was forced to feel the last strands of his life snapping and twisting and fraying as he was lifted from a dying body. Forced to suffer the numbness of phasing into oblivion. If there was anything left to feel at all in the aftermath.

Just the sounds. The cries, if there were any. The last breath leaving stagnant lungs. The resonance of a shattered hourglass.

We learned to cope with it. We had to. There was no choice in the matter.

If there were choices and there were enough to spare, we'd have one. We'd be home.

* * *

It was getting older.

It aged with me. We endured the slow sway of the pendulum together. The lullaby of passing time. It bore its own scars that shared stories of the families that read from its passages and stored in them its wisdom. The cover bore the signs of their use. Fingerprints that did not belong to me. Fragile, arching lines that, together, with skin, spoke to me of the lively, jam-stained hands of a little girl. A living appendage. Alone, it was nothing more than memory.

Fate passed it to me for a reason. For what reason, I had not known. I was desperate for an anchor and this simple book, these jam-stained papers and written songs with living voices, saved me in a way that I thought I could never be saved again. It protected me as I lay in the snow, in the unmoving shrapnel, waiting. Waiting for light. For love. For faith. For the advent of change.

Here it came. It was in my grasp.

I never even heard his footsteps. It was his way, to ghost through the world as if apart from it, a separate soul that lived behind a wall of glass. They crushed ice and rocks and snow beneath them, but the echoes passed over dead ears. On the limbs of trees that let them fall into oblivion, unheeded, insignificant. Even the sun turned its back on them. No one heard them but me.

"Kate."

I didn't hear my name. In the form of a christening, an identity, was a concealment. A smokescreen.

_Please._

I looked. There he was. Quiet. Alive. His edges were tearing, the stitches wouldn't hold. He took a step forward. Every fissure was cast in gold-dusted light, light that left nothing in the shadows to wither and to be dismantled by the reluctance of dutiful restraint. Not anymore. Every scar and open wound alike was bare for me to see.

Another step. And another. Until he stood over me, towering, a citadel of pale skin and dark eyes and hands buried deep in graves of gore. He fell apart in my arms. A paper doll who'd strayed to close to the fire and curled at its charred edges and burned with the pain of regret. Of wishing he could have, but knowing he never did. Nothing escaped him. Not a whimper, not a sob, no salted wings of shedding tears. I couldn't see my reflection in his stone-blue eyes; just Gene. Just him.

Lips parted like curtains. Warm curtains that imparted to me, to save, to keep, little morsels of damaged soul. To heal the wisps of his being, like he healed them. Gray and blue and flecked with the scarlet of life, he left pieces of himself in their wounds. The pearl-white edges of the scars that healed. In me.

But there was no breeze to make them dance, just the thin shudder of a breath that walked the tightrope of decision. Of resolve. To live and let die what couldn't transcend the borders of the past.

His hands. The hands that clasped in prayer. Doused in wishes and hopes and paper-thin veils of devotion that would never reach him. Hands that trembled and fisted and had lost too much and felt too little in their wasted years of youth. They unfolded. They reached for me and draped over the angles of my face like silk. Callused silk. If there could ever be such a thing, it was Gene who would make it.

He leaned, closer, gentle, and his dark eyes were watching me. Every spark of reaction, every cove of sentiment. He broke me into pieces so that I could fit into his grasp, promising to put me back together again. I wanted him to. Please, make me break. Make me crumble. Destroy me and build me and replace the cause that brought me to him. Restore it with the effect…the one that would make me stay.

It was impossible to feel nothing in a moment like this. I felt everything. It spilled out of me. It trickled over his hands, stained them with my insides and the color of butterflies fluttering in my stomach.

And then there was no pause. No reflection.

His eyes closed. His lungs gave way to a breath laced with ice and I felt it rise and fall against my skin as he folded me into him, stole me from the world and the light. Surrounded by war and by filth and by despair, there was still beauty left in the tarnished naissance.

The gap closed between us and his lips brushed, like feathers, against mine. So soft and uncertain was the embrace that I almost couldn't feel it. They unraveled. Silk against silk. Breath against breath. His mouth tasted like wet velvet cigarettes and the cold and smoke and the thin stubble of lingering boyhood bristled against my skin. But nothing in my life had felt more glorious, more sublime. I'd never kissed a boy before.

But it was Gene.

Gentle, healing, beautiful.

Like his hands.


	7. Epilogue: Black

Author's Notes: YAY! The first story I've finished in...two years? Thank you SO MUCH to Sweet A.K for helping me accomplish this feat. And to Band of Brothers...to Eugene Roe...to Shane Taylor. They were my inspiration.

Disclaimer - I don't own Band of Brothers. I only own my OC.

* * *

It wasn't the first time I'd seen the Red.

_His hands were the color of life. _

"_Avery, you've gotta hear me! C'mon, don't black out on me now!"_

_Or was it the color of death?_

It wasn't the first time I wore the mark of loss.

_My heart wasn't moving. It wouldn't beat. His arms bathed in the blood that had stopped flowing through the pathway of my veins and escaped a dying body._

_His eyes flickered. _

"_Ave! _

_Was it a trick of the light?_

I had felt the descent of the removing angel before.

_The shells still fell all around us. Drowning in the snow that battered him, that pushed him further into the ground._

"_Ave, you'll be all right. You'll be fine."_

_His hands wouldn't still. Like machines, they worked tirelessly, furiously, through the motions. I watched the still face._

"_God damn it!" _

_Somewhere, I heard someone screaming. Maybe it was him. _

"_Don't do this to me! You've gotta hold on!"_

He slithered over my hunched shoulders, my blood-soaked hands, and I felt the cold sweep of his fingers.

"_You ain't goin' nowhere, kid. You'll be okay. You'll be okay."_

As he bent to lift my soul.

"_Avery…wake up! Wake up…don't-"_

To leave without a word to spare.

"_Don't you go out on me!"_

But this time I could bear the feeling of him, as he bent his black head over me.

_His hands broke at last. "Kate…"_

His red shadow staining my every wish, my every endeavor.

_He lifted his eyes to the heavens._

As he came to steal me away, put me to rest.

"_Kate…please," his voice crumbled on her name. Fell to pieces on the sound of her silence. "Stay."_

_But still the snow and the shells and the screams droned on._

There were no more lives to save.

* * *

THE END.

* * *

copyright of Harlequin Sequins, 2010.


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